The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Carousel had its fill of movie violence as the zombie outbreak overtook the Speedway. We were largely unscathed. Soon, though, it would want footage of us contending against the infected.

We were not safe. What was more, I was pretty sure that we were past the midpoint, which meant we needed to start making moves. Carousel was going to want some production value from its survivors.

It was getting some value from Kitty Lincoln, who was successfully whipping up these NPCs into a frenzied mob. Strangely enough, they didn’t register as enemies on the Red Wallpaper, but they did have a few enemy tropes that I could see on them.

Strength in Numbers: The enemy is at its strongest in groups; singling its members out will weaken them substantially.

Just Following Orders: The enemy will do whatever their leader says, regardless of their own morality.

Patient Hunter: The enemy avoids attacking the entire group at once until Second Blood, choosing instead to pick off members one by one.

It wasn’t much information, but it didn’t really need to be. These tropes, combined with whatever NPC tropes they had, could make them formidable. At the end of the day, I doubted they were the Big Bad. Our interactions hadn't really had enough animosity to justify that. It was more likely they were just there to help this story move along.

And boy, did they.

“We have guns,” one of the men said. It was the big guy, some kind of mechanic, the same one who had held the door closed when most of us were trying to get back into the garage below. “We have all kinds of things we can use as weapons. We bottleneck them, and then we just get rid of them one at a time.”

“We have no choice,” Kitty said in agreement. “I’m sure none of us wants to get blood on our hands, but it’s either their infected blood or our healthy blood, and that ain’t a choice at all.”

That rhetoric couldn’t lead anywhere good.

I could tell she was having fun with this. She previously struck me as a reserved woman, but it was clear she could come out of her shell and act unhinged.

My teammates and I knew the drill. We had practiced our uneasiness so that, when it was time to have the conversation about leaving the group On-Screen, we were ready.

“This is going to turn into some kind of witch hunt,” Antoine said. “And if they find Kimberly…”

“They aren’t going to find her,” I said. “These people are just scared, but we can’t help them right now. We don’t have the ability to calm them down. Maybe if we went through with our plan, we might be able to get through to them. If we got the story out, the military might start changing its tactics.”

I was babbling, trying to structure some narrative reason for us to leave the relative safety of the owners’ suite.

“Maybe we should just kick them out,” Isaac suggested.

“Okay, fine,” Camden said. “You take the dozen on the left, and the rest of us will take the dozen on the right, and that just leaves the dozen in the middle.”

It was kind of an inside joke how this mob of NPCs had managed to grow. Carousel needed them out of the way in the early scenes so it could make the notable NPCs shine. But now that it needed a mob, more had shown up. Waiters, mechanics, and even a chef who dramatically sharpened his chef’s knife while we talked.

“So we make a break for it,” Cassie said. “Do we know where we’re going?”

“We can run across the track. Most of those things are still on the other side of the Speedway. We probably have time to find a new place,” Anna said.

“No,” I said. “We don’t know where we would be going. There are too many variables.”

“Then what are you suggesting?” Camden asked.

“I doubt there are many people in the tunnels. They’re restricted during a race, right? They’re fairly modular, so we’d be able to check one room at a time to make sure that we don’t have any unpleasant company. And we know for a fact that they lead near the broadcast room.”

I didn’t like the tunnels, but they gave the opportunity for some high-tension scenes in a relatively controlled environment. Carousel had just illustrated for us that running across open ground was hopeless. The tunnels would offer tight corners that the zombies wouldn’t be able to see around, so they wouldn’t be able to imitate our behavior and get high energy all of a sudden.

“Okay, and what about Kimberly?” Kelsey asked. “I’m all for trying to keep her alive. I mean, our group needs to rally around something. But how are we going to keep her controlled?”

Camden and I looked at each other.

“We have some ideas,” I said.

“Now, what are you people plotting over here?” the big guy who had held the door closed said as he walked over to us.

He was mostly bald, but he covered it up with a baseball cap bearing the Wimpaway Bandages logo. His name was now Bruce, although I was certain he hadn’t had a name on the Red Wallpaper before.

That must have meant he had just graduated to get a few more speaking lines.

“Same thing everyone else is,” I said. “How we’re going to survive this.”

“Well, we got a plan already,” he said. “We just kill every one of those sickos, and then we walk out of here like heroes.”

I nodded. “Sounds good to me. Maybe after a long night of rest, we’ll be in fighting shape.”

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He smiled at me like something I had said had rubbed him the wrong way. I think Carousel wrote him to dislike me.

“Did you get bit?” he asked. “Is that why you all are huddled over here instead of with the rest of us, talking about our plans?”

“Nope,” I said.

“If any of you did get bit, it might come to the worst. There ain’t no way around it. Like the lady said, it’s the rules of survival.”

Other NPCs were scattered around, listening to the conversation, but none of them made themselves known. I still got the distinct impression that even though Bruce was his own character, he was kind of being controlled by Kitty.

We kept swapping lines like this back and forth, with lots of NPCs occasionally adding things, carving out their one-dimensional personalities.

Sure, they were different. There was a guy who was a pastor and a woman who was a nurse, and they all had a stance on whether murder was okay. But eventually, they arrived at the conclusion that this wasn’t murder, and if it was, it was all right.

I had never been a part of a scene that took so long getting basic dialogue. Carousel wasn't going to use a fraction of it.

Night fell when we finally went Off-Screen, and that was our cue to get out.

Our saving grace on that account was that the owners’ suite had a full bar, so the more aggressive NPCs spent the night getting drunk, which I assumed was to explain the illogical behavior Carousel planned to make them perform later.

I didn’t want to stick around to find out.

Our set of couches was next to one of the doors leading to the stairway down to the garages. Danny stuck with me, and I was very specific about what I wanted him to film. The thing was, this tower was quite large, and there were several different pathways we could have taken instead of going down into the tunnels, but I felt we needed to get some distance from the mob. I told him not to show those other paths. The tunnels would seem more justifiable if there were no obvious alternatives.

I wasn’t sure if I was making the right decision.

Our plan with Kimberly was quite simple. We put gloves and a racing helmet on her and blindfolded her. As a finishing touch, Antoine gently stuffed her ears with cotton he found in the garage. We had Danny film the whole thing.

After all, these kinds of zombies responded to stimuli, and if she couldn’t see or hear or feel anything, she would be much easier to control.

I could tell that Antoine wanted to kiss her as a way to wish her luck, but he never did. She was still contagious.

And just as I thought we were about to make a clean getaway into the tunnels below, a voice called out from outside the door near the stairwell leading up to the owner’s suite.

“Cassie, help,” the voice called out. “Please, I can’t stop. I can’t. Please help.”

The voice belonged to Ramona.

At first, we thought it was a very haunting choice by Carousel to give Ramona monotonous lines about wanting help from her half-sister, but then she kept talking.

“Isaac, I’m hurt,” Ramona said. “Please. Please, just kill me.”

Something was different about her. She wasn’t a normal zed. More urgently, if she kept talking, she would wake the mob upstairs.

Was Carousel really asking us to do what I thought it was asking us to do?

She was right outside the door. It was nighttime out there, and I had lost track of where all the zombies were outside.

It was a gut-wrenching choice we had to make. Ramona might wake all the NPCs, and if they found us missing before we had time to find a good place to hide, well, I didn’t know what they would do to the other players or to me, but I knew what they would do to Kimberly.

As a pragmatist, I knew our best option usually might be to kill her, but we couldn’t in this storyline. It would seriously undermine the narrative of us trying to save Kimberly if we just callously killed another zombie that we all knew.

Not to mention the fact that I really didn’t want to have to kill her.

“We have to take her with us,” I said.

“We can’t do that,” Camden said. “How are we supposed to control her? She’s not as calm as we would like.”

“Yeah, what’s with that?” Kelsey asked. “It sounds like she’s talking. Not normal talk, but she’s not just repeating the same line.”

I knew it was because of her Adverse Reaction trope, which we had used in the hopes of getting some compelling scenes, but we needed an explanation that worked in-story, too.

“Was she on any medication?” I asked.

“Yes,” Cassie said. “But I don’t remember what specifically. She’s been in and out of treatment. Maybe some tranquilizers.”

“You think that something she took is causing her to react differently to the virus?” Camden said.

“Please, Cassie. I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t control my body,” Ramona cried out in a soft, monotonous voice that, to be fair, was incredibly spooky.

The question I had was whether the real Ramona was in charge of what she was saying or if it was just Carousel puppeting her around.

It didn’t make much of a difference. We had to make a decision.

“Turn off the light,” I said. “We need to go.”

Anna quickly obliged, and the hall went dark.

I noticed that the handle was jiggling. It was locked from the inside, but she or someone else was trying to get in.

The question was: did Carousel see this as a trap we could fall into and die from, or was this some kind of test? We needed to establish that we were moral, wise, and worthy of survival. Could we ignore the zombie that was literally pleading with us and still act like saviors?

Of course, it could be both a trap and a test. Every possible answer could be the wrong one.

Fortunately, not everyone in our group would have to pass that test.

There was a call for a sacrifice. Carousel needed its scary scene. We needed to show that we were wise but also compassionate, and the only way we could make that happen was to risk sacking someone.

He took it better than we expected.

Isaac had some very useful tropes, and it would have been nice to keep him around longer, but the fact was, he was severely underleveled, more so than anyone else. He was also a Comedian, which made him quite capable of making a foolish decision without his choice reflecting on the rest of us.

While we stayed back, uncertain of what we should do, Isaac moved forward toward the door.

“If we leave her here, they’ll kill her first thing in the morning,” he said.

He looked back at us and held a hand out in the dark as if to say, “I’m being careful.”

And then he opened up the door.

Luckily, Ramona was alone.

Unluckily, she was still a zombie.

“Isaac, help,” she said. “I can’t stop myself.”

At first, she stayed still, but when she saw Isaac, she lunged quite casually, and Isaac let out a yelp, which sent her into overdrive, biting at him.

Fortunately, he had a weapon with him. He had gotten it at the bowling alley and brought it along. He had practiced using it On-Screen for practically the whole movie.

It was his yo-yo that he had proudly won from one of those grab-arm machines. Not a normal toy, it was a trope item with the Hitting Display ability attached, which made the user incredibly capable with a sports implement, apparently including a yo-yo.

Combine that with Isaac’s Weapons of Mass Absurdity, and he was able to have both of Ramona’s arms wrapped up in it within seconds. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an entirely useful tactic against a zombie because she kept lunging at him and trying to bite him as he tried to untangle his yo-yo.

The whole time, she was crying for help and apologizing, but it was hard to distinguish that from the growls as she attempted to bite Isaac.

It was as we assumed. She was able to control her speech, but not her body.

Antoine was able to go up and grab Ramona as Isaac wrapped her neck up with his yo-yo string, effectively tying her hands around her neck, which somehow worked and functioned to muffle her.

So, we closed the door and found a sack to put over Ramona’s head and arms, which calmed her considerably. This storyline would be cumbersome if we had to haul all our fallen friends along.

I was pretty sure that Carousel wanted that to be a dramatic scene, but Isaac had managed to make it quite funny. Not that I could laugh at it.

He turned back to us, shaking. But since we were still On-Screen, I couldn’t congratulate him for having done well.

“What?” he said. “She sounded like she needed help.”

We turned and led our two zombie friends toward the tunnel access. How could going underground possibly go wrong?